Death Palette Quotes

I have said three words too many, too bad, I take them back, I add them. I have several times deserved death, especially in Greece, where I sawed up the palette of an old man who stalked my lady friends right up to my camp bed. I messed up the hairdo of the greatest criminal in Chaldea. For all that I did not have to make use of my daughter native to the lower part of her father's vision, all the plains as far as the eye can see which eat hampers full of mother of pearl.

THE PARTY And at last the police are at the front door, summoned by a neighbor because of the noise, two large cops asking Peter, who had signed the rental agreement, to end the party. Our peace can’t be disturbed, one of the officers states. But when we receive a complaint we act on it. The police on the front stoop wear as their shoulder patch an artist’s palette, since the town likes to think of itself as an art colony, and indeed, Pacific Coast Highway two blocks inland, which serves as the main north-south street, is lined with commercial galleries featuring paintings of the surf by moonlight —like this night, but without anybody on the sand and with a bigger moon. And now Dennis, as at every party once the police arrive at the door, moves through the dancers, the drinkers, the talkers, to confront the uniforms and guns, to object, he says, to their attempt to stop people harmlessly enjoying themselves, and to argue it isn’t even 1 a.m. Then Stuart, as usual, pushes his way to the discussion happening at the door and in his drunken manner tries to justify to the cops Dennis’ attitude, believing he can explain things better to authority, which of course annoys Dennis, and soon those two are disputing with each other, tonight exasperating Peter, whose sole aim is to get the officers to leave before they are provoked enough to demand to enter to check ID or something, and maybe smell the pot and somebody ends up arrested with word getting back to the landlord and having the lease or whatever Peter had signed cancelled, and all staying here evicted. The Stones, or Janis, are on the stereo now, as the police stand firm like time, like death—You have to shut it down—as the dancing inside continues, the dancers forgetting for a moment a low mark on a quiz, or their draft status, or a paper due Monday, or how to end the war in Asia, or some of their poems rejected by a magazine, or the situation in Watts or of Chavez’s farmworkers, or that they wish they had asked Erin rather than Joan to dance. That dancing, that music, the party, even after the cops leave with their warning Don’t make us come back continues, the dancing has lasted for years, decades, across a new century, through the fear of nuclear obliteration, the great fires, fierce rain, Main Beach and Forest Avenue flooded, war after war, love after love, that dancing goes on, the dancing, the party, the night, the dancing

And on God’s palette are the colors of the world, and one of those colors is black. So I will not fear the darkness, for it is of God’s making as death is another part of his grand design. My soul will walk in the darkness and shadows and marvel at the night sky. Death is but a journey back to the canvas of my God. —Requiem

It was a painting of the unfolding of time. Time was merely another color in the painter’s palette. Rudoph II once owned it. Its shapes sang to him. Exhausted men swung scythes, women carried bundles in the distance. On a hillside covered in chest-high, golden wheat, the peasants carried out tasks they had performed a thousand times. The sky was yellow with light. The painting, almost a manual on how to harvest, had neither beginning nor end. Jason had stood before it one hundred times and assumed that the secret to his own existence could be revealed if he approached it from the right angle. At other times he felt the painting was suffocating, monstrous. It was a hymn to death: the infinity of the barren sky, the corporeality of the peasants, the cut wheat on the ground, waiting for workers to bind it. He imagined the painter, brush stroking the wooden panel, believed himself capable of seeing the entirety of the universe.

You will say Show me the body, and they will not show you the body. You will wear the only black clothes you own and they will collect what you forgot drifts daily around you: motes of pale dust, the day’s heat, a strand of her hair. You will not touch the mug left on the side table, ruby seal of her lips’ whorls and creases, the wet ring beneath it a zero, a gaping mouth. You will go to the grave and it will be an ordinary hole, it will terrify you. You will not sleep, or you will sleep beyond waking so it resembles a minor death. You will forget it is Tuesday, Wednesday, and one day walking from one room to another, you will realize a week has passed since last her breath shook loose. This will destroy you in that it has not destroyed you.

Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the Gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which—directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634—he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brushstrokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16

Müller’s poem concerns an old street musician who, as a wraith of the beleaguered narrator’s bleak future, forever plays the same tune alone at the edge of a village, undying in an unchanging winter. In the context of Müller and Schubert’s full cycle, “Der Leiermann” occupies the crushing moment at which death itself is revealed to be an insufficient escape from the narrator’s terrible disillusionment, and where he instead resigns to fade into a numb, undreaming circularity. Both Schubert’s and Covenant’s settings of the poem are appropriately spare in their melody, but the harmony, rhythm, and timbral palette in Covenant’s recording mismatches the stagnation in the text awkwardly.

How Etha missed the varied hues of Illinois! The jade of tender corn husks, the violet shadows of distant trees, the furry scarlet spears of sumac. In Oklahoma, the palette was nothing but brown. Brown bridal trains of dust billowed behind tractors. Curtains turned from white to strong coffee. Folks spit river mud after a duster. Washes of beige, cinnamon, and umber bled into the blue sky, depending on which direction the wind blew. The people, the land, the buildings absorbed the dust. All other colors leached away, while brown and its infinite variations remained.